Articles Tagged with: drugs

By Zachary Siegel 07/05/15 Addiction science and neuroscience will make your head spin. It’s not brain surgery Shutterstock It’s the age of what people are calling the “neuro-disciplines.” It all began with a now well-known branch of medicine called neurology, the study of the nervous system, whose first registered usewas in 1681. The Ancient Greek prefix has since attached to, well, just about every discipline under the sun: neurolaw, neuroengineering, […]

If you understand the fundamentals of addiction, you’ll understand that it was never about the drugs or alcohol or other self-destructive behaviours. What characterizes addiction is the obsessive and compulsive nature of the behaviour and also what happens when we do act out on that behaviour. We start a process that is exclusive to our condition, POWERLESSNESS. Powerlessness means that we lose control and our lives become unmanageable. Unmanageability can […]

By Jeanene Swanson 06/02/15 Learning about the economics of decision-making could mean the difference between relapse and long-term sobriety. Shutterstock Most, if not all, addicts and alcoholics struggle with quitting and staying sober. And many have an equally hard time understanding why. What if would-be recovering addicts and alcoholics knew more about what goes into the making decisions—and how setting and achieving goals, and putting value on rewards, goes wrong in […]

There is a difference between recovery and abstinence. It took me close on ten years to figure out the difference between the two. One is a fight, the other is freedom. I’ve often heard people saying that it’s a constant fight to stay clean. In my opinion that is abstinence, if you are truly in recovery there is no fight. The desire to use has left me and my days […]

It’s not always rainbows and sunshine in early recovery. Gone is the myth, just because I’ve stopped using everything will be okay now. On the contrary, because you’ve stopped using or acting out on your addiction you will start to see the REAL wreckage of your past. All those feelings that have been pushed down for so many years start to surface. Don’t back away, it’s now time to move forward and start sorting through it […]

‘We were entirely ready to have God removes these defects of character’ Step four and five prepare the field for step six. If we have not done a thorough step four and five then step six becomes useless. What we get from step four is a list of our character defects. Hopefully from there we will understand that our behaviour stems from our character defects, directly. My experience with step […]

“We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs” For step five to be effective we must have, without reservation put all our honesty into step four. The key words in step four are searching and fearless. Step four has called for us to face ourselves with courage and truth. Addressing shame, guilt and resentment on this level requires a depth of […]

Through our using we came to believe falsely that we were self-sufficient; that we didn’t need anyone else, we couldn’t stand anyone else as long as we had our drugs. Through this thinking, our interpersonal skills and abilities to communicate with others were put on hold and very possibly damaged. We were not designed to live in isolation, yet this is where addiction takes each one of us. Coming into […]

12 Step Program: Step 2 ‘we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” The ‪spiritual ‪‎principal of step two is ‪‎Hope. Looking back on Step One briefly, we will see that we have admitted, accepted and understood that we cannot use drugs successfully and because of that our lives have become unmanageable. It leaves us in a dark and rather hopeless place of, what now? This is […]

MEETING THE FAMILY NEEDS From point of admission, clients are steered towards taking responsibility for the relational damages behind them and the financial chaos brought on by their addictive lifestyle. We assist each client to recognize the need for building an Amends Programme into their recovery plan. This includes what has to be a mutually agreeable, realistic, financial reimbursement outline for treatment expenses incurred by the family. Marriages are […]

How To Help a Drug Addict | Intervention: The goal of an intervention is to get the chemically dependent individual to accept the need for help now. Three key facets need to be considered as a means of creating as successful an intervention as possible: Dynamic Factors: The abuse of loved ones, the possible removal of all help and support, the possibility of the loss of a job, the possibility of […]

In the search for addiction treatment you may find a wide variety of treatment approaches, and several definitions of what actually constitutes (a) an addiction and therefore (b) a relevant treatment. One model is the Behaviour Modification Model. According to Wikipedia ‘The first use of the term behavior modification appears to have been by Edward Thorndike in 1911. Through early research in the 1940s and the 1950s the term was used […]